Getting Social - a guide for small businesses

This presentation was created as a guide to small businesses. It talks about the demographics of users of different social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Youtube) with data for 2012 wherever possible and includes information on measuring influence and ROI. All rights reserved to Tabitha Potts.

Getting social: Why and How on Prezi

Small Business Sunday Event with Theo Paphitis

Twitter was buzzing with excitement recently because the organiser of Small Business Sunday, Theo Paphitis, the well known Dragon, was arranging a Winners' Event where all the winners of the competition could get to meet each other. You may not know what Small Business Sunday is - every Sunday between 5.00pm and 7.30pm, small businesses are encouraged to tweet @TheoPaphitis with a link to their business and including the hashtag #SBS. He usually picks six a week to retweet and it can have dramatic results on their website traffic and ranking, not to mention sales! Sunday was picked as it is what he calls "thinking time".

I won Small Business Sunday on May 15th 2011 and was thrilled with the results: a doubling of traffic to my website and a five-fold increase in traffic to my blog. It's wonderful exposure for any small business and what's particularly great about Theo is that he encourages a lot of green and eco businesses, like mine, by retweeting them on Small Business Sunday.

For the winners event, all of us were invited - by Twitter, initially! - to go to Edgbaston Stadium in Birmingham. There was a great atmosphere and I had the chance to meet a lot of people I usually only chat with on Twitter.

The new website for Small Business Sunday was unveiled: it's a fantastic networking site for those who have won the competition and also anyone who is interested in learning more about them. I'm very impressed that it's been set up so quickly and as he said, it's all come about through the magic of Twitter, as the designer was one of the SBS winners!

Theo gave a great speech and also spent a lot of time answering questions so I'm only going to go through some highlights that stuck in my mind.

Asked about the environment, he talked about feeling about the planet as you might feel if you've not taken enough care of your body and you realise the damage you've done and decide to stop doing any more: it's a vivid metaphor.

He also had some tips for people starting a green business - being green alone is not enough, you've also got to have a great product and a market for it, as well as the persistence to make it work. These three things, in his opinion, are essential for any entrepreneur.

Stand out quote of the evening? "If you fail to plan, you plan to fail" - he talked a lot about the importance of planning in business. Another point he made was you can't afford to be shy - your competitor, even one with an inferior product, might get ahead of you. Also, you need to be passionate about your business - so passionate that you can spend hours boring your friends about it!

Finally, he had some pointers for people hoping to win the next Small Business Sunday. You've got to have a website, if a business doesn't have one he won't consider it. He likes quirky tweets. He might be more likely to notice you if you've tweeted him directly or outside of Small Business Sunday (that's going to increase the amount of tweets he gets!).

Below is a photo of me with Theo, proudly clutching my certificate. Luckily I checked before the photo was taken, of course I was holding it upside down!

A presentation on Social Media in TV using Prezi

I was recently asked to give a talk on Social Media and how to use it in television by the recently launched The Talent Manager - it's a great new company set up by TV training experts DV Talent that gives television freelancers a central database to store their CVs and update them regularly so that all their potential employers can see them. I've worked for a few TV companies recently (helping them with social media) and I used to work in television so this was a really interesting challenge.

I was on a panel with Peter Heneghan, Social Media Ambassador at Channel 4, and Olly Lambert the documentary film maker, so no pressure there then.... Peter Heneghan talked about using Twitter hashtags and the importance of choosing one carefully and publicising it wherever possible. Channel Four's recent Dispatches on artificially high-priced tickets on 'fan-only' websites used the hashtag #TicketScandal and flashed it on the screen during the programme itself. It trended on Twitter and is still attracting new tweets. Olly Lambert talked about what it was like to direct a reality documentary series (The Family) when one of the family members was seen by viewers as 'bullying' another and became upset by the criticisms of her behaviour on Twitter. He also talked about his very funny, and popular, Edit Suite Stories Facebook group. The gist of his talk was that great content will always find its own audience, but he has also experimented with hashtags on Twitter and found them very useful as a way of encouraging debate.

As we were having a panel discussion with brief presentations I decided to try out a new tool, Prezi, to make my own presentation. It is cloud-based presenting and the site itself is very easy to use and find your way around. To create a new presentation, just click "New Prezi" on the site once you've registered and logged on. 

If you're used to Powerpoint or similar tools, Prezi is a bit disorientating at first. You will see a blank page where you can add text boxes, links, images and Youtube clips using a strange blob-shaped controller at the top left of the screen. This is your Master document where all of your images, text and clips will be displayed at once.

Images can be any size, and you can zoom in and out when viewing them in the presentation. Rather than adding 'slides', you set a path on one main screen using the Path command which will put your images, text, Youtube clips etc in order. These will then display as 'Slides' at the bottom of your edit screen, so you can see whether the order is correct.

When you present, the viewer pans from one 'slide' to the next on the same screen: the best way to make use of this is to zoom. There are some great example Prezis on their site which will show you some dramatic ways to do this.

Prezi worked very well for my presentation and once I have mastered the best way to make use of its graphic qualities I would use it in preference to Powerpoint, I think. You can download it and store it on a memory stick which works on Macs and PCs, or access it on any computer connected to the Internet - hurrah for the cloud! If you have created a free Prezi account, be aware that you cannot make your Prezi private.

One other issue is that it's not currently possible to create an audio track to play with the presentation (except by some fairly complicated workarounds) so you are out of luck if you want to make this a stand alone web presentation with an audio commentary.

Social Media in TV on Prezi

Preparing your Facebook Business page for Timeline on March 30th

Facebook is switching all Facebook Business Pages to the new Timeline design.  This change rather crept up on me, but I managed to get ready in the end. I thought I'd blog a few notes  for those who are still trying to figure out the changes that have been made, especially other small businesses owners like me without a lot of time on their hands.

First of all, to see how your page will look you have to activate Facebook Timeline Preview. There should be a Preview tab at the top of your page - if not, go to Introducing New Facebook Pages and press the green button to preview your page. Ta da!

What you will probably notice immediately is a gap at the top of the Page where you should put your Cover Photo (just click Add Cover Photo or Change Cover Photo and upload or select from your photos on Facebook). This image should ideally be 851 x 315 pixels in size and I recommend that you make this a priority before all the Pages are switched over on the 30th of March. Businesses are not supposed to put any promotional material or text on here. It's quite hard to come up with the right image if you are a business selling all kinds of different products, so I settled for a collage (made for free in Picasa and edited with Gimp). I'm going to adjust it seasonally to show off different products from my range.

Your Apps will be displayed below the Cover Photo as square buttons rather than tabs as they were before. The default Photos folder always comes first on the left. You can change the order they come in by clicking on the little pencil icon on the top right hand corner of each button. An option to swap places with another button will come up. You can also customise the 'cover' for each App, if you like, by adding an image.

For a business, it makes more sense to add Milestones than it does on a personal Facebook Profile (where it often feels like bragging - at least, to me!). Milestones are new product releases, reviews, awards, important dates and so on - you can add them via your Status bar which displays just below your cover Photo. They will display on your Timeline at the appropriate date once you have added all the details.

Don't forget to check, and if necessary, edit your About section, which appears at the bottom left of your cover photo just above your Status bar, as it is very prominent int he new Facebook design.

'Like-gating' - asking Facebook visitors who are not fans to Like your page so they can get a special offer or promotion - is apparently something Facebook is not keen on, as they've made it more or less impossible to create a custom landing page for visitors. Instead, everyone arrives on the Timeline. It is possible to create a custom landing page for adverts, though, so you can create an advert for a particular promotion or offer for non-fans to entice them over.  I recently came across a helpful article on Alternative Tactics to Like Gating which explains some other ways to try and increase your Likes.

Importing your blog as Facebook Notes has been discontinued for a few months now, however it is still possible to import your blog using Networked Blogs, and I've switched to this in a bid to get a little bit of my life back! I've set mine to publish on my Timeline via Syndication.

When you are ready, press Publish - or you can just wait for Facebook to do it for you!

Please visit my Facebook Page and let me know what you think - or if you have any comments please leave them below.

How to get your author photo to show up in Google search results

In case you've ever wondered how some people get a thumbnail photo of themselves to show up in Google search results, these are known as Google author links and they are a great tool for making yourself more visible in search results and increasing your credibility if you run a blog. I've just managed to activate mine and thought I'd pass on the methods I used to get myself listed: it's really a question of patience and trial and error. You can see how the thumbnail photo looks in the screenshot below: it's about four times larger than the small photo that appears when you have shared a link on Google Plus and which usually says "You shared this".

Google has detailed instructions about how to activate Google author links but it isn't terribly clear how to apply this to different blog platforms. I've managed to activate these successfully in Wordpress and in Blogger so thought I'd pass on the knowledge I've gained about the simplest way to do this. You will need to have a Google Plus account for this to work. These notes are for people with single author blogs only, but you will find instructions for multiple user blogs on the Google link above. These instructions are also relevant for Google+ personal profiles rather than business pages.

1. If you haven't already, set up your Google Plus account.
2. If you don't have one, set up an About Me page on both your Blogger and Wordpress accounts. Add any biographical information you want to appear in search results (you can link your Blogger and Google+ accounts here but you still need to have an About Me page for this to work in my experience). Don't forget your keywords!
3. In Wordpress, you may need to add the Allow Rel= and HTML plugin if you are using the Wordpress Author Bios page.
4. Sign into Google Plus and copy the URL at the top of your home page which will be https://plus.google.com/ followed by a string of 21 digits. This is your Google Profile URL.
5. Go here to get your personalised Google+ profile button and paste your profile URL into the box it shows you to generate the button HTML code. Copy the button HTML code (NB this is NOT the same as a "+1" button which allows others to share your content).
6. Add the button code at the bottom of your Blogger and Wordpress 'About Me' pages (remember to paste into the HMTL section not the visual editor).
7. You should now have a button at the bottom of your About Me pages that links to your Google+ profile, just like I do here.
8. Now sign into your Google Plus account and go to 'Edit Profile'.
9. Look for the '+1's' tab and click the box saying 'Show this tab on your profile' (I'm not entirely sure why this step is necessary but I include it as a lot of other walkthroughs have mentioned it and I did it myself).
10. Next, click the 'About' tab and click on the section saying 'Contributor To' and 'Add Custom Link'
11. Add the link to your About Me page (NOT just the general URL) ie http://www.myblog.com/aboutme.html for both your Wordpress and blogger blogs.
12. Go to the Rich Snippets Testing Tool and put your About Me page URL in the box to check that your mark up is working correctly. The result should look something like this:

13. Google have provided a form you can send them to let them know you have added the Author link to your blog or site. It's worth filling it in as they may get back to you if it doesn't work.

That's it! You can also add reciprocal links from your Google+ Business Page to your business website too, if you like, as I've done on Mimimyne, using this link, although it does not mean you will get author style profile photos in search.

Here's a useful resource on Google author links by Joost de Valk for Wordpress users and a detailed post on Google author links by AJ Kohn that I also found useful.

It's also possible to get verified using your email address, try this link here - I haven't used this method myself but it may be quicker than the method I described above!

Once it's set up and running correctly, you can check your Author Stats in Webmaster Tools in the Labs section.

Spring cleaning your Mac and organising your time

I've been trying to clear out my clutter online as well as in my home so I can start 2012 feeling on top of everything! As I work for myself I have to manage myself, so I try and organise my time as efficiently as possible.

Here are some of the tricks and tools I've been using that can streamline your life and hopefully, save time and hard disk space.

Sync your task list from Google Tasks to iCal
If you are a Mac user and a Google fanatic like I am, you may find yourself a bit frustrated if you are trying to sync your iCal Task List and your Gmail Tasks List. I've found a small app that enables you to do that: it's called iGtaskforiCal and it's by Innov8tion software - they also sell a similar syncing tool for Outlook. This is very easy to set up and run and you will find your Tasks lists syncing in no time so that all your Tasks are visible in iCal as well as Gmail and automatically updated when you change either. You can also choose to sync your Gmail calendar to iCal - I'd set mine up already so didn't enable this option.

I've got my Google Calendar syncing on my Android as well (using GTasks, a free app available in the Android Market) and it all works perfectly together. This is great because I can set up a To Do list with dates on it that are viewable in my calendar, and I can view everything on my phone or on my desktop computer. It's $19.99 (£12.95) at the moment, but it just saves a lot of time and the only free alternative (a work around where you email your To Do's to Gmail) isn't really that satisfactory. There's a free trial.

Clearing out your inbox
Archive all your email and get it out of your inbox. It's so simple if you have Gmail - just select all your emails and hit "Archive". Your inbox is automagically empty and you can search for your emails whenever you want, or view them under the appropriate labels if you have set up Filters. If you don't use Gmail, thenextweb has simple instructions for doing this. I now have a more or less empty inbox which I can quickly declutter each day.

Get rid of duplicates in iPhoto.
I've noticed that I have a lot of duplicated images in iPhoto from multiple imports, etc, and as most images I use are quite large they are taking up a lot of disk space. I've looked around and the best solution I could find online was Duplicate Annihilator, as Apple does not appear to have an in-house solution for this problem (why not? I don't know). This is not a free app but searching the first 500 images in your iPhoto library is free in the trial version - it costs $7.95 (£5.15) to buy. I found 12 in my first 500 and the app is currently claiming to have found 1143 while searching the computer - that's over 1GB of space! You can set it either to trash the duplicates, or just label them so you can double-check.

Increase my productivity using Rescuetime.
This is a free app and well worth investigating. You can set up projects and keep track automatically of the time spent on them: it also automatically categorises everything you do online so you can see exactly how much time you waste on Twitter and browsing shopping sites...I've set the app with all my different projects: for the billable ones it's a big help although you have to set it up quite carefully for it to be accurate. You can set up daily goals (eg more than one hour on writing) and it will send you a report each week telling you how productive you have been. There's even a widget for your iGoogle page, if you have one set up.

Back up to the Cloud
I'm always terrified of losing data, as I've had several hard drives fail on me. I love the ease of use of Time Machine but my elderly back up drive no longer works with it. I could have splashed out on a new one but I decided to investigate online backups instead and discovered Dolly Drive. There are some disadvantages - the first back up takes forever if you don't use their hard drive service (which is free with some accounts) - but I like the idea of being able to access this data from anywhere and the fact that even if my computer and back up drive were stolen, I'd be able to get hold of all my information again. It's worth noting that if you back up to Dolly Drive with Time Machine you can't back up to a local drive as well, so it isn't a belt and braces solution. However, Dolly Drive allows you to create a bootable clone which you can keep on a hard drive and use to get your computer working if (heaven forfend) the hard disk breaks.

If you fancy doing some more digital decluttering, Lifehacker has a great round up from last year (but still relevant!).

Mimimyne won the Greenest Trader 2011 Award from the National Market Traders Federation

Tabitha in Spitalfields Market with her award for Greenest Trader 2011

I had some wonderful news this year when I found out I had won an Award for Greenest Trader 2011 given by the National Market Traders Federation, the oldest trade body in the UK for market stallholders. I regularly run a stall at the famous Old Spitalfields Market on Sundays - it's where the old fruit and vegetable market used to be, and I remember visiting it in those days when I was growing up in Spitalfields in the early 80's. It's a wonderful market to trade in as well nowadays as it's enclosed, bright and spacious, has very enticing food stalls and restaurants and lots of exciting events and activities going on. The other stallholders are great fun and sell all kinds of interesting products, especially handicrafts, jewellery and clothing. I won the Award because of the nature of the products I sell and the fact that I transport my goods by bicycle - no carbon emissions there! I wasn't able to go to the Awards Ceremony so the award judges were kind enough to visit my stall and present it to me in person this December: thanks again to the NMTF for doing that!